all our intuitions and thoughts and every moment of our
being, and is our supreme, our last idea. Beside it we, have absolutely
no fundamental idea. Life and death, health and sickness, time and
eternity: we can imagine and picture to ourselves how one gradually
shades off into the other, but not that which lies behind these divided
dualities as a common solvent and reconciliation. (1841)

_Antigone_, representing as it does a romantic individual subject in a
classical form, is the masterpiece of tragic art.

Life is the attempt of the defiantly refractory part to tear itself
loose from the whole and to exist for itself, an attempt that succeeds
just so long as the strength endures which was robbed from the whole by
the individual separation.

"What a man can become, that he is already." God will not lay the
decisive weight on the sins committed by sinful individuals against one
another but only on the sins committed against the idea itself, and
there actual and merely possible sins are one and the same.

(1843)

Expiation in tragedy occurs in the interest of the community, not in
that of the individual, the hero, and it is not at all necessary,
although it is better, that he himself should be conscious of it. Life
is the great river, individualities are drops; tragic individualities
are, however, blocks of ice which must be liquefied again, and in order
that this may be possible they must break and wear themselves away one
against the other.

There is only one necessity, which is that the world should continue to
exist; what happens to individuals in the world is of no consequence.
The evil that they commit must be punished because it endangers the
existence of the world; but there is no reason why they should be
indemnified for the misfortune that befalls them.

(1844)

Absolutely everything depends upon a right conception of guilt. Guilt
must not, in any direction, be confounded with the subordinate
conception of sin, which even in the modern drama--where indeed it
finds, for reasons which are not far to seek, a wider scope than in the
ancient--must always be merged again into the conception of guilt, if
the drama is to rise above the anecdotal to the symbolical. For the
conception of tragic guilt can be developed only from life itself, from
the original incongruity between idea and phenomenon--which incongruity
manifests itself in the phenomenon as extravagance, the natural
consequence of the instinct of